Hey gang. Another week slips by much faster than expected. Maybe it seemed fast because I've been lost in a land of javascript, php, broken web standards, pointless browser differences, and ultimately little final results. What's this all about? I'm working on some more fun features for the NTPCkr candidate public voting pages coming down the pike. For example, a way to easily zoom into these waterfall plots to closely inspect interference near candidates. There's some neat flash/javascript based graphic packages out there that sort of do this, but underneath the flashy good looks it's all clumsy and client side and can't handle the amount of data we're pushing out. So I'm rolling my own tools, after trying out another javascript based package that should have been plug and play but was more like just plug.

This should have been easy, but nothing works as expected on the WWW. It's becoming a major time sink, though I'm close to finishing one test example - which only works on Chrome. And Chrome does this terribly annoying thing of resizing images however it sees fit, with no option for (a) users to turn this off or (b) web designers to force a certain size. One general problem I have with the internet and all related technology is that there way too people who implement "practical" features with zero thought about design, and somehow even less consideration for the actual designers. I swear - I don't know how anybody does web development full time without stabbing themselves in the eye with a fork. It's like being a surgeon who only has access to a random pile of variably sized band aids. And you're asking yourself, "well how do I make an incision?" and the experts reply, "well, duh, you use the wrapping and make a papercut, you n00b!" Anyway...

Server wise, the databases are playing nice this week thus far, and the mysql replica is working and caught up for the first time in a week. We had some issues with the upload storage just before the planned start of the outage on Tuesday. This is just one of those things that will time away as server shuffles continue. Bob is working on getting Astropulse copied to its new server. I didn't have much time for any other upgrades beyond that, but have been helping Jeff brainstorm through the current NTPCkr performance issues. Oh yeah - he's running the show tomorrow and may try the "only let uploads through at first" for a couple hours upon opening the floodgates.

Hunh. Just noticed now our workunit storage server is quite full again. Well, other things are stored on that server and I'm finding one of the causes of bloat are the db purge archives, which archives all workunit/result information from the mysql database as flat files before deleting them. If we didn't purge these from mysql we'd have billions of rows by now, which would be impossible to deal with. At any rate, the only really useful information in these files is which participant worked on which result, which will come in handy when we need to figure out who gets to share our Nobel prize. So I guess I have some file parsing/management in my new future to whittle these 700GB of archives to 10GB of user-to-result lists.

- Matt
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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

as an aid to your frustration with Chrome you can turn the image resize off but it takes a bit of fiddling by a user so still not ideal

basically from a simple google search

(preference file in Win7 will be in C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default - or similar depending on windows version)

1.- Start with a clean preferences file (star Chrome and completely close it)
2.- Then open Chrome again and browse to a website.
3.- Right-click on any item on that website and click on "inspect element" That will open the webkit developer tools. Go to "resources" tab and click on "Enable resource tracking".
4 .- Close Chrome
5.- Open Preferences file. This block should automagically be inside, near the end:

5.- "inspector_settings" value could be any other type. That doesn't matter for this hack.
6.- Add a comma after --- "inspector_settings": "lastActivePanel:string:elements\n" ---
7.- And paste --- "shrinks_standalone_images_to_fit": false --- right on the next line. The result should be as this:

I agree that cross-browser web development is very difficult. Even with most engines other than Trident (Internet Explorer) being fairly consistent in terms of HTML/CSS handling thanks to web standards, there's still the nightmare of ECMA/JavaScript compatibility and broken/premature support for HTML5 draft specifications.
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Soli Deo Gloria

Dunno if you looked at Processing.js at all? Or if it is even suitable for your needs.

http://processingjs.org/

From the home page.

"Processing.js is an open programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets. Processing.js uses Javascript to draw shapes and manipulate images on the HTML5 Canvas element. The code is light-weight, simple to learn and makes an ideal tool for visualizing data, creating user-interfaces and developing web-based games."

Jeff, If you have a spare moment this weekend, Can you turn Seti Beta's Forum/website on please,

(The scheduler is up and running, so we can get work, and it validates, but since the site is still in maintenance no one can change their preferences,
and i heard one report of a user being unable to reattach to Beta)

Okay a glimpse into the "Mind of Soft".. make a 3D game out of it. "Fly" our aresenal to a location(google earth style).. "attack" the "source" of it with various algorithims... and either "defeat"(rule it out) or "report to universal authorities" .. various functions to show "visual" analysis....

Of course this would take a great deal of developing a stand alone 3D client and many other things.. but I suspect many wanna be game programmers could have a blast helping through an open source. And if successful might have an impressive credit to their resume!